Shakespeare and Historical Formalism

Stephen Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138264885
• eBook ISBN: 9781317056645
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Located at the intersection of new historicism and the 'new formalism', historical formalism is one of the most rapidly growing and important movements in early modern studies: taking seriously the theoretical issues raised by both history and form, it challenges the anti-formalist orthodoxies of new historicism and expands the scope of historicist criticism. Shakespeare and Historical Formalism is the first volume devoted exclusively to collecting and assessing work of this kind. With essays on a broad range of Shakespeare's works and engaging topics from performance theory to the emergence of 'the literary' and from historiography to pedagogy, the volume demonstrates the value of historical formalism for Shakespeare studies and for literary criticism as a whole. Shakespeare and Historical Formalism begins with an introduction that describes the nature and potential of historical formalism and traces its roots in early modern literary theory and its troubled relationship with new historicism. The volume is then divided into two sections corresponding to the two chief objectives of historical formalism: a historically informed and politically astute formalism, and a historicist criticism revitalized by attention to issues of form. The first section, 'Historicizing Form', explores from a variety of perspectives the historical and political sources, meanings and functions of Shakespeare's dramatic forms. The second section, 'Re-Forming History', uses questions of form to rethink our understanding of historicism and of history itself, and in doing so challenges some of our fundamental literary-critical, pedagogical and epistemological assumptions. Concluding with suggestions for further reading on historical formalism and related work, Shakespeare and Historical Formalism invites scholars to rethink the familiar categories and principles of formal and historical criticism.

PART 1
Historicizing Form

Chapter 1

The Materiality of Shakespearean Form

Douglas Bruster

Matter has clearly won the day over form in the study of Shakespeare and early modern literature. A growing fascination with cultural content has focused attention on literature’s engagement with the matériel of social life—with clothing, printed texts, household goods, even body parts. The result has been, in the words of Henry S. Turner, “a moment in early modern studies when a declared interest in material culture—objects, things, bodies, places—has become synonymous with a claim to theoretical currency.”1 Discussing these “new scholars of the object,” Jonathan Gil Harris has noted that the “current vogue for so-called ‘material culture’” has produced “calls to get ‘material’ in a new way—by embracing physical objects as the stuff of history.”2 As evident even in the titles of such works as Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture, Material London ca. 1600, the “Material Culture” volume of Shakespeare Studies, and Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, “matter” and “the material” now define a reliable center for early modern studies.

If matter is in, form is, for the most part, out. “Formalism” has even become something of a dirty word in the field of early modern literary studies, as Richard Strier has observed.3 With its suspicious-sounding suffix, the term regularly appears as a pejorative epithet in evaluations of scholarship. For instance, one reviewer criticizes a chapter on King Lear because its author’s “concern with representations rooted in history is more or less abandoned as he engages in a stylish piece of textual analysis which owes more to formalism than it does to either old or new historicism.”4 Another takes an author to task for clothing himself in the garb of materialism when his true self is otherwise: “[the author’s] insistent reductiveness suggests an imperfect understanding of postmodern hermeneutics, and a need to level the playing field so that he can set himself up as a peer of Greenblatt (his favorite materialist). Inevitably, he gives the game away in delineating his own critical position, which in the end is a variety of formalism.”5 Form was once regularly opposed to content. As these extracts suggest, it is now contrasted, to its detriment, with history and the material.6

That the low status of form in the study of early modern literature concerns more than critical nomenclature can be seen in the influential New History of Early English Drama, edited by John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan. Called by its cover material “one of those rare books that transforms the field” (Stephen Orgel) and “the most inclusive, innovative, and important overview of the drama that we have had to date” (Peter Stallybrass), this critical anthology has quickly become a standard handbook. As its title implies, the volume’s relation to literary form is quite revisionary. Deploying Ben Jonson’s distinction between the “body” and “soul” of drama, the volume’s editors come down decidedly on the side of “body.” This means, in their account, not “playwrights and play texts as the substance of dramatic history,” but instead “the social and material circumstances in which early English drama was enabled and inhibited.”7

It is difficult to resist such an authoritative, attractive phrase as “the social and material circumstances” of early English drama. And A New History of Early English Drama has obviously done valuable work for the field in exploring those very circumstances. Yet the collection is perhaps not as “inclusive” as its jacket suggests, for, defining itself as the history of what it takes to be a form (that is, drama), it oddly limits what circumstances count as “enabl[ing]” by virtually occluding the array of conventional dramatic forms: comedy, tragedy, and history, to name only these.8 For example, the lone index entry for one of the major genres is “Tragedy: influenced by ideas of divine judgment,” and where “genre” might be expected to appear a reader passes from “Geertz, Clifford: on royal entry as sign of dominance” to “Gift: as contract, in royal entry” without encountering the term.9

While conventional literary form makes little impact upon A New History of Early English Drama, the concept of form appears frequently in this study, and most often in reference to the shaping abilities of non-dramatic matter and to the traces of that shaping. Hence in place of index entries for “comedy” or “history,” we get references for such topics as “Ad quadratum construction,” “Audience placement,” “Beating the bounds,” “Book closet,” “Bookshelves,” and “Marriage, aristocratic: as social theater.” Throughout the New History of Early English Drama, such extra-textual agencies, objects, and events supplant traditional literary categories and the elements of form that have conventionally been understood to underwrite literary composition and reception.

Clearly the New in this influential volume’s title comes not merely after but at some expense of the old, which in this case means literary form as traditionally conceived. Such invidious positioning is not necessary but remains perhaps the logical progression of a materialism that has grown increasingly literal in its self-definition, turning away, as it does so, from form as a significant category and carrier of meaning.10 As Stephen Cohen reminds us, during the 1970s and 80s New Historicists initially displayed interest in the social valences of literary form, yet this interest oddly gave way to a model in which literature and literary form were subsumed under the larger category of “cultural practice.”11 Lost in this movement has been the integrity of literary form as an entity for early modern writers and readers.

Form, that is, has become critically viable mainly when it is not the form or forms concerning which Shakespeare and his contemporaries would have had conscious thoughts—and by means of which not only authors but publishers, printers, booksellers, and readers variously advertised and consumed works of literature. Unfortunately, critics concerned with the material have largely turned away from not only critical formalism’s varied past but also the more traditional modes of materialist criticism. Materialist criticism was formerly a much broader, more complex method, and based on a capacious understanding of materiality. That capaciousness of definition is largely alien to recent criticism. And because matter and form are so frequently understood to be opposites, the definition of form today is not much more supple. When people speak critically of form, that is, they typically offer little by way of definition, preferring instead to leave it simply as that which is neither material nor historical in nature.

Why should matter be so attractive now in literary criticism, especially at the expense of form? Recent criticism appears to take matter to be a good because it is hard, verifiable, and consequential, while form is seen as soft (that is, imprecise), elusive, and without much consequence. We value matter because its significant qualities seem to include being

real	(that is, it exists)
historical	(it exists in and over time)
efficacious	(it not only exists in time but has an effect on its time)
overdetermined	(its effect on or interaction with its time is multiple and complex)

These are by no means sufficient, exhaustive, or even necessary qualities of the material. Others could well offer a different list of qualities. Arguably, however, these remain among matter’s most attractive characteristics to critics today. This is perhaps especially the case with recent varieties of historicist and materialist criticism, for which these qualities are near to desiderata.

Ironically, this list of attributes for “matter” also functions as an entirely apt set of characterizations for literary form, including, and in some respects especially, early modern literary forms. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, form was not only materially efficacious, but, in its very efficacy, often a seemingly present, overdetermined “thing” with identifiable dimensions, properties, and consequences. Those interested in literary form today are thus justified in seeing it as a profoundly historical quantity, a thing and a process not easily separated from matter, and in every way as relevant as more apparently “objective” things to the study of early modern society, culture, and history.

My aim in this essay is not to hit upon or convey hitherto unrecognized aspects of materiality and form, but rather to foreground the meaningful overlap between them where they relate to the study of literary texts. Before attempting to show the ways in which form can be seen as having possessed a material valence in relation to early modern plays, I would like to offer some provisional definitions. First, though, a disclaimer: along with such terms as culture and nature, form is surely among the more complicated words in the English language. Clearly no essay could hope to do justice to either its semantic range or philosophical lineage. I should point out, therefore, that I offer merely a modest range of definitions for “form” as it pertains to the study of Shakespeare’s works, and, by extension, the literary works of his contemporaries and even those from other eras. None of these definitions is controversial. For them, in fact, I have relied on such common reference works as the Oxford English Dictionary (s.v. “form” I.1.a, 5.a) and Alexander Schmidt’s Shakespeare Lexicon and Quotation Dictionary, and bolstered material there with information gleaned from various early modern dictionaries.

Emphasizing form as a material thing where it relates to the study of Shakespeare, we can understand the term to include the following senses:

1. The immediately perceivable shape of a work of literature and of its parts; a work’s appearance (form as material)

This definition of “form” can be applied immediately to the physical dimensions and qualities of a literary work, whether printed or in manuscript. If it is commonly accepted that every production of a play is an interpretation of it—an essay on the drama, as it were—the same may be said of the various physical forms through and in which we encounter literary works. A play or other work from the early modern era may be many things: bound or unbound, large or small, heavy or light, printed on various kinds of paper, in many varieties (and even combinations) of font and/or style of handwriting. They may come to us titled or untitled, with ornate pages and decorations or without these, paginated or unpaginated (sometimes with foliation or without). The words may be arranged with a strict interest in economizing space (that is, packed onto a page), or with more generous margins. Thus the Shakespearean text, according to a foundational essay by Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass, remains “a provisional state in the circulation of matter.”12

Indeed, as Julie Stone Peters has confirmed in her historical survey, Theatre of the Book, the provisional states of dramatic works have varied widely with time and place of printing.13 This variety across publications is also found within them. Regarding the specific arrangements within the works of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, for instance, readers may well encounter verse and prose set differently; they may find act and scene divisions, no such divisions, or division by act or scene alone. Owing to (among other things) heterogeneity of authorship and compositorial labor, the pages of an early modern text may display profound differences of spelling, punctuation, and layout. Speeches may be prefixed with the full form of a character’s or figure’s name, an abbreviated form, or a combination of these; a text may even use a variety of terms to designate what appears to be the same character or figure. The location of an act or scene may be identified or left to the dialogue (or reader’s imagination). A play text may have a cast list or dramatis personae prefixing or following its dialogue; sometimes this list (and even the speech prefixes and/or stage directions themselves) may indicate which performers have taken or are to take which roles.

While I have framed these observations on form as visible shape in relation to early modern texts in their own time, they have clear relevance for readers encountering Shakespeare’s works in today’s formats as well. From editions of the plays or poems on the Internet (including hypertext versions) to mass-market paperback editions and recorded-book versions, Shakespeare’s works come to us in many formats, formats which necessarily affect how we process and evaluate the works. The popular “complete works” editions we may have on our shelves offer modern readers a Shakespeare text that none of the writer’s contemporaries would have had exposure to, for, in addition to their scholarly apparatuses, these collections commonly include the sonnets and narrative poems in addition to plays gathered (and not gathered) in the 1623 Folio of his “Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies.” It perhaps goes without saying that the quasi-monumental Shakespeare that emerges from these editions of his collected works differs from the writer presented by an inexpensive paperback copy of a play or poem, and that the latter differs itself from a paperback that extensively annotates the text and appends to it a variety of primary and secondary materials. All of these elements—“formal” in nature—affect a reader’s definition and experience of the Shakespearean text.

2. Kind, variety (form as materially produced)

A second way of defining form in such a way that its material implications are more apparent is as literary type, kind, or variety. “Form,” in this sense, refers to the genre or genres of a literary work. For Shakespeare, such forms included not only the major dramatic genres, but the vast array of forms and modes contained within dramatic works, including, among many others, satire, songs, elegies, epigrams, epigraphs, orations, riddles, and proverbs. Added to these were his collected Sonnets joined to A Lover’s Complaint and two forays into narrative poetry of erotic–tragic orientation, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. Such genres and modes provided authors with both the tools and the raw materials for composing works of literature, works almost always multi-generic in nature.

Genre has often struck critics as being too imprecise to be trusted. Because genres can tell similar stories with varied emphasis (and locations, characters, etc.), and because works of substantial length often incorporate or draw on multiple literary kinds, describing a work’s genre can be a frustrating experience. This frust...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Historicizing Form
• Part 2 Re-Forming History
• Further Reading
• Bibliography
• Index